FS9 Citation X 2.0 Update

     Well I've been slaving away the past several weeks on the Citation X, in between renovating our kitchen, and I'm happy to report that I'm nearing that light at the end of the tunnel in regard to the work required by me on this project. Soon I'll be mapping gauges to the Virtual Cockpit, getting various parts to process display conditions with XML, insert animations, then general clean up. She has an updated fresh and clean look now with less polys, less texture files, yet greater overall detail and performance.

Owen's back at the big house. 

Be sure to keep an eye on Owen's blog, he's just attended the 2008 MVP Global Summit in Redmond. I'm sure he'll have a fountain of information, photos, stories, and maybe even some inside scoop once he gets back!

Sun N Fun 08!

  We have been pretty lucky over the last few years during the Sun N Fun Fly-in over in Lakeland. The weather has been just terrific. Last year was pretty dry, trails of dust behind cars out in the huge pasture parking lots.. but the temperature was good. This year the ground was still fairly moist after several days of steady rain, but the temperature was again wonderful, followed by gentle breezes.

I had gotten inside the gates about a half hour before Ron, (Eaglesoft Development Group) and Stasi, (Mindstar Aviation) spotted me over by the Liberty Aerospace display. They were walking up sporting bags, cameras, and  big smiles on their faces obviously happy to be back in aviation toy land again.

All the big boys were there again this year and plenty of new guys on the block. The most prominent letters this year were VLJ and LSA, and the manufacturers brought their bright ideas with them and put them on display to show the weren't playing around. It seemed around every corner were Aspen Avionics with their oh-so-cool glass gauges. Virtually plug and play, they drop right into the existing panel holes that house the steam gauge six-pack, and are surprisingly affordable.

Ron and Stasi check out the Aspen PFD in the new Liberty. It's not a really really small plane, Stasi is just a big guy!

We had to drop by for a few pics of the FKA Columbia 400 which is now known as the Cessna 400 and 350. It was a little strange seeing the logo on the tail after spending so much time working on the FS Columbia 400 project.

Heading over to the Eclipse display you never know what they've brought with them. In case you missed it at Air Venture, Check out the 'Concept Jet' V-tail single VLJ. Aerodynamic design has been left to George Lucas.

Yes, it flies, and it looks like drag would not be an issue. 

You know, we left dial phones and dial modems in pursuit of greater technology, but apparently a dial up throttle isn't necessarily a step back.

Right next door to Eclipse sat Cirrus, taking up a huge chunk of real estate alongside their trademark Cirrus semi truck. There were three nice things to enjoy there;

What? A Light sport? How did I miss that? Ron gets a shot of the panel there, and a nice panel it is.

Over the left wing of the sport I saw something perched on a pedestal that looked a lot like an Eclipse Concept Jet;

I like the placement and design around the engine area, and with a larger fuselage it gains an extra window.

Lastly lets pay our respects to the ever growing great one;

Cirrus Generation 3 turbo GTSX.... mommy.

Ron, Stasi and I stopping is to visit Russ over at Piper.

We dropped in over at Diamond which is my personal favorite, these folks make a nice airplane. We met some very interesting people in the pavilion  as well as met with many of the representatives concerning our upcoming projects.

The DA-42 Twin Star. One has to simply appreciate the thought put into the use of space, ease of entry/exit, visibility and just darn good looking.

The Da-50.. be still my heart...moon lighting in the cabin ceiling. 

Stasi and I got a kick out of this Superstar!

Time flies like everything else around here and it was time to head back to reality. A visit to the AOPA tent, FLYING Magazine store, and a smoking hot corn dog on the way out. Those beautiful planes continue to fly overhead as we say our goodbyes, until next year.

       This upgrade has been a good experience and everything has gone surprisingly well in the setup, installation, and customization needed to bring it back as the hub of research, design, development and communication for the biz. A nice ASUS M2N-SLI carries two 'SLI'd' Nvidia 8800 GT graphics cards like saddlebags on a Harley. At the helm, AMD provides the dual core 64 5000's alongside four, 'gig-a-piece', sticks of the good ram...oh the fun to be had. Vista looks great and is appropiately named. I'm surprised how much of the fairly new hardware/software doesn't have, or won't be, providing any Vista updates and suggest you rely on Vista's drivers without new software. I.E. the photo toolbox software disc for my HP photosmart printer is not compatible with Vista so it operates on the basic driver. A visit to HP downloads page finds a notice that there are no plans for them to update the software. Thanks god 3DS Max8 loaded up and seems to work fine though. I've still got alot to do and look forward to posting some nice screens soon.

Ah, FSX has never looked so good.

It's that time again, we're getting ready for the Sun N Fun fly-in 2007 over here in Lakeland Florida. I'll most likely spend at least two days out there wandering about mindlessly, overwhelmed by beautiful aircraft, aviation gadgetry, and corn dogs. Ron (Eaglesoft) and Stasi  (Mindstar Aviation), look to be dropping in on the 10th of April. We'll be driving in because it seems until Florida gets it's tax ax sharpened up, flying in could bring on a hefty cost, READ THIS story and get involved.

If you haven't had a look yet, head over to Owen's blog and check out what he's been doing with the newly remapped FSX Citation X 2.0. He's done some terrific repaints on the new 2048 wide template, and they are crisp and sweet! Folks are really going to appreciate how easy it will be to paint, even the most complex schemes, on his planar mapped template. No stretching, skewing, or distortion anywhere. If you like the external model, you're are certainly going to love the new VC cockpit and cabin.

Owen's done a fine job with the planar mapped fuselage and nacelles. With the panel lines, rivets and other details in place it really just keeps getting better. I'll throw in a bit of shading then we should be about ready to move on to the VC's of each version.

As my dear friend Emeril would say, "Oh yeah babe". These are temp 'testing' textures mind you, those heavy shadows are not in the final product. You already saw the naked master template before, so.. take a peek at a portion of the master template now...

     Yes, that's ALL the layers involved here. Every bit of shading here is on the single 'shadow' layer, one quick slider tweak adjusts everything in loving harmony. Take it away and all you will see is lines and rivets. No white paint needed for the 'highlights' either, simply the absence of shadow does the job nicely, so repaints are as easy as wax on-wax off! There's plenty of room for improvement though, with many of the large textures I find myself asking me myself and I,...what was I thinking?!

Oh, and one other peek, dont tell...

     Yeah... that's a Rolls Royce. :)

At last count: Our model is 4 megs lighter, and 6 less texture templates than the original.

X-TREME MAKEOVER

     Okay, I admit it. It's alot more work than I originally anticipated. Along with what I already knew I wanted to do to bring the Citation X 2.0 model and textures up to the ready line, human nature kicked in. Suddenly, one can find the scope of their original plan expanding. You could relate it to scrubbing a smaller, dirty mark on your car then, lookie here... now I got a clean spot! Unable to break the hypnotic fixation, you soon find yourself washing the entire car, waxing, vacuuming.....

Well I suppose it's a good thing and since I have the time I might as well dig in a bit deeper and trim more of the fat on this Citation X-treme makeover while I have a few days off from the 'other job'. Oh, and Diane's acting all silly and happy because our old washer just went 'toes up' forcing me to spend all of my Lowe's gift cards on something other than what I had hope to spend them on. So, as it goes, we're getting a new fancy schmancy one Sunday, at least that makes me golden for a while.

The Citation X, although loved by everyone and very successful, was overweight. Paying attention to what's being said in forums, having friends like Owen, and through trial and error, good things are learned. Originally, my plan was to make the transition to 2.0 quite painless with a quick conversion to the new model, change some colors here and there, and revamp the VC for the new gauges. Unable to break the trance which had me locked into the vastness of the aircraft's texture folder, I finally gave in and started stripping the thing down to the studs. Popping rivets, pulling seats, rearranging and moving everything I could to take better advantage of precious pixel space. Animations stripped, parts relocated and retextured at their new home, animations reinserted. My backs killing me but the 2048x1024 master template is looking tight babe, and I've still got room.

  I rolled her out this morning and she's back to looking like her old self again but much lighter in polygons, vertices, and texture calls. There's still always some room for a slight nip-tuck here or there.. but hey, I'm on a schedule over here. Some nice additions so far include a baggage door now.

I've actually cut the windows out on this model, (instead of having them 'painted' out while using the magic of the ole customized draw order trick), so now they look thick and happy. The model is mapped across two 1024x1024 .bmp's to insure those sharp textures everyone wants. Increased performance because of the lighter model. Everything is clickable or obtainable through the preflight gauge. Click to close the cockpit doors and the cabin vanishes to free up more performance if desired, and so on.

I'm anxious to start on the VC, there's alot of love already there but what's in store is really going kick. I've got to get started on the dreaded panel lines and rivets next and get those to Owen, so back to work we go.

A legend reborn for FS9 and FSX 

I'm very happy to say that our extremely popular Citation X for FS9 is back in the shop for a much needed makeover. An early product put together a few years ago by the original core team at Eaglesoft including myself, Ron Hamilton, Bill Leaming, Lonny Payne, and assistance of Rob Young 'Real Air Simulations'. It wasn't long after it's successful release that we soon considered it to be the flagship of ESDG.

To me, the Citation X was very special not just because I modeled my wife in the cabin,  but also because of what I learned from it. Being quite green, not just in the world of modeling at the time, but also inexperienced in how to model and texture a project with respect to the techniques that would result in the most efficient use of polygons and textures. Over a year of every minute of my free time everyday I chained myself to my desktop and chiseled feverishly and banged the thing into shape based on research photos collected from several Citation X jets over at MCO's Cessna Service Center.

Near completion, I went on to incorporate imaginative ideas into the project that would make it stand out from other 3rd party aircraft, to be unique and more fun. Such as the animated passenger posed for various configurations. She became an international favorite figure and brought 'life' to the cabin for many many owners who always feature her in their reviews, screenshots, and even YouTube videos. The maintenance girl working in the avionics bay of the nose, pitot and engine cover flags swaying in the wind, a visually rich and warm cockpit and cabin with custom night lighting that would inevitably turn many 2D flyboys into VC pilots. Small touches like the cabin plaque that would display whatever livery you would be flying and, of course, the passenger's laptop computer and wine to add the final touch of Business + Money= luxury. It was released with four different model options to further insure it would please those owners with low, or high end machines.

So what is left to improve on? Plenty. The Citation X 2.0 will feature many improvements based on customer feedback and changes in technology. A fully functional FMS and full gauge rework will most likely be one of the greatest anticipated enhancements. Other improvements include a completely remapped exterior over two 1024x1024 bitmaps to insure higher resolution textures. Optimized model to improve performance and reduce the number of overall polygons and texture calls, a preflight gauge to allow the owner to display, (or not display), various extras such as the passenger, maintenance crew or even cabin. There's plenty more on the table and even a few surprises that I'm not going to mention at this date.

My friend, MS MVP, and fellow team member Owen Hewitt has taken the model under his own wing and is currently working his Max mastery of magic to bring the Citation X 2.0 to FSX! Those who have seen what he can do already know that the FSX Citation X will undoubtably be something to behold. Those who don't, take a gander at the Twin Comache he designed in my photo album. The image above is an actual render from his FSX work and you can see more here. The experience he has unselfishly passed on to me has been invaluable in my work to make a better product. 

So, stay tuned over at Eaglesoft, the excitement is building! 

PIPER TWIN COMANCHE GOES GOLD!

The Eaglesoft Development Group has announced the release of their Piper Twin Comanche for FS9! Check out the screen shots here if you haven't seen them, then run over to Eaglesoft to download yours today!

Congratulations to Team Eaglesoft for their hard work and commitment in the development and release of this quality FlightSim product!

Twin Comanche goes Beta!

The Eaglesoft Piper Twin Comanche is now in Beta testing over at our quality control labs. She's being given a thorough going over by the design team and many other highly qualified testers. Testing is actually going quite well as we move forward squashing bugs, tweaking textures, and buff, paint and polish. The high note of the project is the smooth performance offered by the FS9 model, much effort has gone into the entire aircraft to insure pleasing frame rates which allows more room to crank up some sliders and have some fun.

Here's a link to some amazing photos of Nick doing just that! Check them out here!

FS9 Piper Twin Comanche,  Final Developments

    The Eaglesoft Piper Twin Comanche, based on Roy Wilbanks' real world  aircraft, rolled out of Bob's paint and body shop today. Over the past month I gave it a good going over to refine and detail Owen's base texture sets. As promised, I have some photos below but the real beauts are in the photo album above....be sure to check 'em out full screen. 

The plane was a joy to work on and who could complain with the excellent R&D material Owen provided. Roy and Owen are great friends, so Owen frequently tags along with Roy on some of his many flights. Given more time one can always find more areas of the texture work to improve upon, and by the effecient layout of texture sheets, more time became available to go back and tweak things further.

These shots have been resized so they wont look as good as the ones in the photo album, either way it's all still very much work in progress....which is why I left the gauges covered and omitted other areas as well.

It's a great looking aircraft and certainly one of a kind. I'm sure once she is made available those who own her will be more than happy with the quality of the project as well as the fun of flying it!

                    Piper Twin Comanche

                         in Final Development

The Eaglesoft Piper Twin Comanche featuring Pilot Roy Wilbanks and the aircraft's distinguished design is now in its final stages of development before being blessed for beta. 

I received it a few weeks ago to begin final texture tweaks. Owen has done a fine job on the modeling of the aircraft as well as insuring a completely efficient layout of parts and textures. Users will appreciate the fluid FPS this package will provide. 

Panel and gauge work is looking top notch as Ed, Bill, and Ron continue striving for nothing less than top quality in function and appeal consumers have come to expect.

Read more about Roy Wilbanks and his 'dream come true' here. 

I'll post some updated photos before I send everything back up to Owen. 

Stay tuned over at the Eaglesoft forums for all the latest developments on our first twin!